At the outset of her career, Clara Bow's flame burned bright, so bright, in fact, that she appeared in 15 films in 1925 alone. Three years later, she received 33,727 fan letters in one month, an industry record and perhaps, according to the Washington Post, a human one as well.
Bow's appeal was many faceted. In accordance with the writer Eleanor Glyn's definition of "it," Bow appealed to both men and women. Not only did she have the perfect flapper face and figure, she also radiated fun and excitement and spontaneity. On-camera, she was irresistible. Off-camera, she was 100 percent real at all times. Take, for instance, her response to one of her more famous break-ups: "I cannot marry Harry Richman as I am expecting a nervous breakdown."
Many of the movies she made in 1925 are forgettable (see The Lawful Cheater, a crime drama about a gang of misfit crooks who see the error of their ways, and Parisian Love, in which Bow's character claims to be of the Apache nation), but several are enduring artifacts of a time and aesthetic she helped shape.
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